After spending 45 years behind bars for a murder he didn’t commit, Richard Phillips walked out of court officially a free man Wednesday.

Phillips was convicted of the 1971 murder of Gregory Harris in Detroit, but always maintained his innocence. He tried to appeal his conviction several times with no success, including a 1997 appeal that languished in the courts.

After the judge dismissed the murder charge against him, and advised LaMarr Monson to go enjoy his life, he held his sobbing mother in the hallway just outside the courtroom for a long time.

Delores Monson never gave up on her “baby son,” now 45 years old. For years, she tried to convince people her baby was innocent.

“Different prosecutors, judges, lawyers, I’ve been to so many people it’s not even funny. But I thank God for Jesus. And I thank God that my son is home. And he’s free!” she shouts, beaming ear to ear.

A man who was found guilty of shooting his friend outside a Detroit restaurant 25 years ago was released from prison today.

A Wayne County judge threw out Desmond Ricks’ murder conviction after it came to light that the conviction may have been based on faulty evidence produced by the Detroit crime lab. The lab was closed in 2008 after a state audit found widespread problems.

Stateside's conversation with Julie Baumer. She was exonerated after spending more than four years in prison.

"You can just imagine the hell."

The hell that Julie Baumer describes is her life after being tried and convicted for a crime that she did not commit. She spent more than four years in prison after the courts found her guilty of child abuse involving her five-week-old nephew. When she was ultimately found to be innocent of the charges, she was set free.

SBS is when a child sustains serious, possibly even deadly, head trauma after being violently shaken. It can cause internal bleeding in the brain and behind the eyes, as well as neck and spinal cord damage.

The Michigan Supreme Court ruled this week that Lorinda Swain, who served more than seven years in prison for child abuse, is entitled to a new trial. And the prosecuting attorney says he’s dropping all charges.

Swain was convicted in 2002 of sexually abusing her adopted son. But her son later recanted and told the court he’d lied about the abuse.

Swain’s attorneys also presented new witness testimony they said made the prosecution’s timeline of the abuse impossible.

Bill Proctor retired after he spent 33 years as a well-known Detroit television reporter.

But rather than focus on his golf game, he's using his skills as an investigative reporter and a former law enforcement officer to help criminal cases where he believes the person has been wrongly convicted.

To accomplish that, he launched the organization Proving Innocence. As he sees it, the organization helps overturn some of the wrongs done by our criminal justice system.

The Michigan Innocence Clinic says a wrongfully convicted man has served nearly 20 years in prison for a murder he didn't commit.

Lamarr Monson was convicted of brutally killing a 12-year-old girl in 1996.

But attorneys with the Innocence Clinic say Monson was forced into a false confession, and that new fingerprint evidence points to another killer, who's currently living freely in another state.

A brutal killing

Lamarr Monson and Christina Brown were both selling drugs out of the same apartment in Detroit in 1996. Monson would eventually tell police their relationship was sexual, but he says he didn’t know she was 12.

He spent four years in prison after he was convicted in 2009 on an arson charge. But now he is free after a team of lawyers from the University of Michigan's Innocence Clinic proved he was wrongfully convicted.

The Innocence Clinic team said Caminata was convicted on "junk science."